


& wait for it to blink first

by soundthebells (kosy)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Light Angst, M/M, Spoilers for MAG165, alternate ending to mag165, discussion of canonical major character death, hurt/comfort elements, she’s back! i said so! i know the real ending to 165!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:20:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23929819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/soundthebells
Summary: In the ashes of the Not-Them, Jon and Martin find a body.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood & Sasha James, Sasha James & Jonathan Sims, background Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims - Relationship
Comments: 85
Kudos: 441





	& wait for it to blink first

**Author's Note:**

> i listened to the episode and i'd figured she wouldn’t come back when they killed the not-them but like. damn i miss sasha lol. enjoy the read!!

The dread Sasha feels in that moment is inexpressible, and for a very, very long time it is all she knows. 

Probably, it’s the worst fear she’s felt in her life. Fear like when her father called her in the middle of class when she was sixteen and said her mother was in the hospital. Fear like the thing calling itself Michael digging its fingers into her arm, digging out the small silvery writhing creature embedded in her skin. Fear like watching Tim speak into a tape recorder, wholly unaware of the worm-ridden corpse of a woman behind him. Fear like having to leave him behind to get help. Fear like getting separated from Elias on that mad run downstairs and forcing herself into the Artifact Storage room. 

Fear like seeing  _ it  _ flickershifting its way through the dark of the cluttered room. Fear like gray limbs reaching for her and grabbing on and holding tight. 

Fear like that and so much worse. The pain spreads through her until there is no _her,_ there is nothing at all except for the screaming of something that might have once been flesh and nerve and muscle and bone. Her thoughts aren’t her own; _nothing_ is her own. Not even her own body. Not even her own self. 

This is how it is. And it lasts forever, until—

Until. 

Sasha chokes on smoke and dust, and this is how she remembers she has lungs. She’s sprawled on the ground—somewhere. The soil, if that’s what it is, is oddly warm and a little stickily damp. She digs her fingers into it and forces her eyes open. The world is slightly blurry, so she pushes herself upright and fumbles around on the ground around her until her searching palm falls on her glasses, which she shoves on. The left lens is cracked but still serviceable. 

The coughing hasn’t abated in the time since she came to. If anything it’s gotten worse, great heaving gasps of air in and wracking, awful choking noises out. 

“Please,” she wheezes out, though she doesn’t know to whom; her eyes are watering so badly that her glasses don’t make much of a difference in her vision. 

In the distance: “Wait. Did you hear that?” 

Sasha forces herself to speak through the coughing. “It’s—is anybody there? Hello?” 

A little closer now, a different voice: “Oh my God.” 

“What?” asks the first voice. 

“Martin, it’s—” and she recognizes that voice, she  _ knows _ that voice, it’s— 

“Jon?” she laughs incredulously before doubling over again, hacking out another coughing fit. “Is it really you?” 

Quick footsteps are making their way toward her. “Martin, it’s Sasha! She’s—”

“How can you be sure?” says the other voice, yes, that’s Martin, Martin Blackwood; she works with him and she knows him, and— 

“I just am,” Jon says irritably, like he’s told him the exact same thing a thousand times, and  _ really, Martin, can’t you just listen for once? _ and that’s him. It is. Fonder, though.

Fingertips touch her arm lightly and just like that, the coughing disappears and her vision clears. “Jon?” she repeats, at a loss for what else to say. 

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s me,” he whispers, dropping to a crouch so that they’re on the same level, and Sasha gets a look at him for the first time. 

“Christ. You look like  _ hell, _ Jon.” She sees Martin then, holding tight to Jon’s hand ( _ Huh,  _ she thinks somewhere in the back of her mind) as he kneels too, and she amends her statement. “Both of you do.” It’s true—Jon’s covered in scars the origin of which Sasha can’t even imagine, hollow-cheeked and heavy-eyed and more grey hair than black at this point. Martin’s not much better, scruffy and unshaven and also prematurely greying, though he looks less like he was thrown down a particularly rocky hill. Several times. 

“Hah. I, uh. I bet,” Jon mumbles. He’s swaying a bit, looking at her with an awe that verges on unsettling, and she laughs nervously, leaning back. 

She remembers very suddenly and stiffens, eyes wide. “Oh, God, Jon, you should—there’s something in Artifact Storage, I think it’s the thing from the, er—the Amy Patel statement? It’s not—it came at me, and—” 

The noise that comes out of Jon’s mouth then as he rocks back on his heels is a strange mockery of a chuckle. “You needn’t worry about that anymore.” 

“Jon killed it,” Martin pipes up, a brief, proud smile twitching across his face. He’s looking at her oddly too. Different, though. Not awe or cautious elation. Just poorly masked confusion and a sort of fear. 

It’s almost enough to distract her from what he actually said. “Sorry, Jon what?”

“Killed it,” Jon mutters, ducking his head shyly. “Or, um, destroyed it? Whichever term you want to use, it definitely doesn’t exist anymore.” 

“You—okay, I’ll come back to that later—oh my God, Prentiss. What happened? Is she still—?” 

That same weird laugh from Jon. “No. No, she’s… out of commission as well.” 

“You kill her too?” She aims for a joke, but it falls flat. 

“That one wasn’t me, no.” His lips twist ironically. 

Out of nowhere, annoyance surges through her. “What  _ happened, _ Jon?” That seems to give him pause; he just looks at her with a lost, open expression. She’s never seen his face like that before, vulnerable and afraid and so obviously miserable. It’s enough to nearly send her reeling. 

But he doesn’t reply. She glances back and forth between the two of them, twin statues of uncertainty and a grief so tangible that she almost doesn’t want to look at it directly.

“You died, Sasha,” Martin finally says, voice so soft she can hardly even hear it. “F-for over two years. You’ve been— _dead_ for over two years.” 

“The thing that got the guy in the Patel case,” she says blankly. Now that she knows it, she doesn’t feel anything at all. “It took me too. And it changed my pictures. And everybody’s memories. And nobody knew I was gone.” 

“Melanie King knew,” Jon tries. “From Ghost Hunt UK? The YouTuber?” 

“I get erased from existence and the minds of my loved ones for over two years and the only one who knows is a fucking  _ YouTuber?” _

“We found out in the end,” Martin says defensively. “Elias told us after a year.  _ He _ knew all along.” 

She opens her mouth to speak,  _ Martin, we worked together for years, please,  _ please _ just tell me you know my face, please tell me you recognize me, _ but Jon cuts her off. “Elias is evil. By the way. He was secretly Jonah Magnus the whole time,” he says dully.    


“God,” she mumbles.  _ “God.  _ All this is…”

“I—yeah. Yeah, that’s about it,” Jon murmurs, scooting a little closer so that their knees are pressed together, and absurdly, after everything, that’s what makes her want to cry. 

“I don’t,” she says, blinking away the tears in her eyes, and stops. There’s no end to that sentence. “What’s—so, if Martin’s here, and Elias is evil, and Prentiss is dead, and that thing is dead, then did Tim surv—”  _ No,  _ she thinks,  _ no.  _ “Where’s Tim?” she asks firmly. “Apparently I haven’t seen him in over two years and he doesn’t know my face, so. I think we ought to talk next time we see him.” 

Jon just looks at her. “Sasha,” he says softly. 

“No.” 

“Sasha, I’m sorry,” Jon whispers miserably. 

_ “No.”  _

“He took out the whole Circus with him. He stopped them—” 

“I don’t  _ care. _ Tim’s—” Sasha covers her mouth with her hand and closes her eyes tight. Her palm tastes of wet earth and sick. 

“I’m sorry,” Jon repeats. He’s got a thumb tracing circles over her arm. “I would have stopped it if I could.” 

“But you still  _ didn’t,” _ she snarls through her own fingers, knowing it’s unfair, knowing there was probably nothing he could’ve done, knowing that when Tim got an idea in his head there was no getting it out, knowing that Tim would die for the mere memory of his brother. Knowing all of that and not caring, because he’s still gone. And she hadn’t even been there to— 

“I know,” he says, voice trembling and so, so tired. “I know.” 

“Okay,” she breathes. “Then…” 

“We can take a moment,” Jon tells her. He looks to Martin, whose hand is resting protectively on his shoulder, but Martin doesn’t give any indication one way or the other, so Jon turns back to her. “However long you need. I know it’s… a lot.” 

Finally, she lifts her head to look around, and it’s as if the world suddenly comes crashing back in. Except it’s not the world. It’s not the world at all. The earth is pulpy and stained the coppery brown of dried blood, and there’s a glistening human eye in the sky and a massive carousel with screaming fleshy things taking up the horizon and a jagged dark tower in the far distance and trenches riddling the space in between and the demented melody of a calliope playing over it all. And Jon. Somehow, in this landscape of horror after horror, her eyes keep going back to him. Like he’s the focal point. 

Sasha lets out a shuddering breath of a laugh and repeats, “What  _ happened?”  _

Jon laughs too, an awful, strangled little noise. “Well, Sasha. I got a promotion. And then I ended the fucking world.” 

“Jon,” she says. She can feel her hands shaking. 

“Yeah,” he breathes as if speaking to himself, eyes closing. “Yeah.” Without warning, he lurches forward and wraps her up into an awkward hug, all too-prominent bones and pointy elbows and the smell of sweat and unwashed hair, and she curls into him without even thinking because the warmth of it all is like nothing she’s ever known, like something that she’d lost so long ago she had started to think she’d never had it at all. There are tears on her cheeks, on Jon’s worn flannel, and they must be hers. Ha. She hasn’t cried on somebody since she was a kid. She can feel Martin too now, his arm heavy and solid across her back, and she can feel the fragility of Jon’s ribcage under her palms, and surely Tim’s in here somewhere too, fingers curled into the hair at the nape of her neck or head tucked under her chin. But she’s alive. Somehow alive. 

“So the world’s ended?” she asks, only a little unsteadily. 

“Yeah,” Jon repeats, and he tightens his grip on both of them for a second. “But everything’s going to be okay.” 

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! you can find me [@boneroutes](https://boneroutes.tumblr.com) where im fully into the magnus archives if you’d like, and comments and kudos are always much appreciated! and of course feel free to tell me about any mistakes lol; this is an unedited mess written fully at 2am. thanks again!!<3


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